Simply Heaven Read online

  And now we’re on the rocks at the top of Mgarr ix-Xini creek, lying side by side as salt dries into healthy skin, handing out a caress here, a kiss there, throwing each other quick glances of complicity and playing another round of the truth game.

  What you do is this: you each have a bunch of stones. You take it in turns to say something about yourself that’s true. If it’s also true about the other person, they put one of their stones on your pile. The person who wins is the person who gets rid of all their stones first. As a drinking game, it can be pretty cruel, but sometimes, the way we play it, you’re just as happy to lose, as the forfeit always involves physical contact. And, baby, the physical contact.

  I think some more. Then I ante up, say: ‘OK. I once manipulated the feet of a cast member of Neighbours.’

  ‘Got me there. Which one?’

  ‘A blonde one. You’re not going to tell me you’ve heard of her. She didn’t go on to have a blistering pop career. But she had toenails like pork scratchings and skin like Emmenthal.’

  Rufus’s lower lip wiggles like a seismograph reading. ‘Just my type,’ he says. ‘A lot of the girls where I come from spend the entire winter in riding boots and never change their popsocks.’

  ‘That’s attractive.’

  ‘Well, you don’t want to be downwind of the hunt ball. It’s amazing they manage to catch any foxes at all, really.’

  I’ve slowly started picking up that Rufus comes from a more elevated background than my own, that the accent is more than Hollywood English. It’s the small things: the references to horses, the occasional rueful mention of the fact that he wore a tailcoat to school.

  ‘So was that a truth, then?’

  He shakes his head. ‘True, but not a truth. Let’s see …’ He takes his own turn at staring over the azure water.

  ‘OK,’ says Rufus. ‘If my grandfather was alive, he’d be over a hundred and forty years old.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘True. He had my father when he was seventy-three.’

  I laugh. ‘No. But that would make him old enough to be my yaya’s grandfather. It’s too weird. And this was by his first wife, was it?’

  Rufus, for some reason, tweaks my nose. ‘Cheeky. No, his first wife went down with the Titanic at the age of thirty-eight. He was twenty-five years older than her.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, not sure apropos what.

  ‘I don’t think the family were too upset. She was running off with some Canadian lard baron she’d met on Paddington station. Saved everyone the embarrassment of a divorce, and besides, I think they all probably felt it was a judgement from God. My family has always thought that God was on their side, one way or another.’

  ‘So who was your grandmother?’

  ‘The youngest daughter of one of his shooting buddies. She was well over forty years younger than him.’

  ‘God! Poor cow!’

  He shakes his head. ‘I think it was probably a lucky escape. Youngest daughters were generally lined up to look after the old folk and then eke out their lives on tiny allowances from their brothers’ whims at the time, and at twenty-five she was already heading over the hill for a normal marriage in those days. As it was, she had fourteen years of pandering to Grandfather, and she’s had another sixty pottering about the place telling everyone what to do. Mummy’s been a daughter-in-law since practically the ark.’

  ‘Your grandmother’s still alive?’

  ‘She’ll be a hundred next year,’ he says proudly, ‘and still has most of her marbles.’

  ‘Impressive,’ I say. We live, after all, in a world that sees vacant longevity as evidence of a life well lived. ‘And you mean they’ve lived in the same house all that time?’

  He gives me a funny look that I can’t quite interpret. ‘Urrr … yuh.’

  ‘Holy Ada. That must have been tough.’

  ‘Well, there’s a fair amount of room,’ he says, and, changing the subject: ‘Go on, then. What’s yours?’

  ‘Oh. Right. Um … OK. I once danced so energetically I dislocated my knee.’

  He curls up into a ball and makes ai-ai-ai noises. ‘Jesus, Melody. Would you be accident prone, by any chance?’

  ‘I guess. Hadn’t really thought about it. Do you think I have a lot of accidents, then?’

  ‘Let’s see. Third-degree burns from an exploding cherry bomb. A broken arm falling out of a tree. Kangaroo scratches. Losing a fingernail by catching it in a rucksack strap. Two crowned molars from falling downstairs. A torn ear lobe …’

  ‘Now, that wasn’t an accident. I told you: that was Linda Ho.’

  ‘I don’t think my sister ever got into a cat fight.’

  ‘She started it.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you just sat there and took it, though, did you?’

  ‘Bitch.’

  He laughs. Loudly. Slaps his thigh. ‘I like a woman,’ he says, ‘who won’t take any nonsense.’

  ‘Is that your go, or are you just patronising me?’

  He puts a stone in the middle. ‘Go.’

  ‘I like a man who knows his place.’

  Looking sly, Rufus picks up a stone to add to the pile. I’m on him in a moment. Any excuse for a play fight. ‘Don’t you dare! Don’t you even think about daring!’

  I pin him down, gripping his wrists, and feel him buck beneath me, laughing. And then, because it feels good, I make him buck some more. And then he twists his wrists until they slip out of my grip, and grabs me by my shoulders, pulling me down until we are body to body, mouths an inch away from each other’s.

  ‘This is a good Catholic country,’ he pants. ‘We shouldn’t be doing this. A priest might come along at any moment.’

  ‘Do him good,’ I reply, a little breathlessly. ‘We’re not breaking the law. Not even beginning.’

  ‘Yes, but if we’re not careful, we soon will be.’

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ I whisper at him.

  ‘I don’t want to be careful.’ Suddenly, his beautiful face is serious, shy eyes looking up at me through lowered lashes. ‘I never want to be careful when it’s you.’

  So I kiss him. Tender and strong. ‘No need,’ I tell him. ‘I trust you.’

  He pushes me back upwards, sits up himself, so that we are sitting, pressed together, face-to-face, legs entwined like an illustration in the Kama Sutra. ‘Do you? Do you really trust me?’

  I nod because, to my surprise I’ve just realised that I do. Trace the smile lines around his mouth with my right thumb.

  ‘I believe that,’ he smiles. Puts an arm round my waist and pulls me closer. ‘OK, then. Here goes nothing.’

  With his spare hand, Rufus picks up a stone and lays it on the pile in the middle. ‘I love you,’ he says, ‘and I want to marry you.’

  And I don’t even hesitate. I take my final pebble and add it to the heap.

  ‘I win,’ I say.

  Chapter Four

  Marry in Haste

  Twanny Mifsud isn’t even the half of it. Our marriage, six weeks later in the registry on Merchant Street, in Valletta (Las Vegas this ain’t – they force you to sober up before the wedding here), is attended by Twanny (which is short for Antwan, by the way) and his wife Marija, Stiefnu Micallef and Pawl Zammit, representatives of the Marsalforn police who were called out to investigate my disappearance by Marija Boffa, whose husband, Jakbu, had found my clothes on his salt pans and my unlocked car on the road above it, put two and two together and failed to come to the conclusion that I’d suffered a sudden attack of lust. The Boffas are with us too, as well as Stiefnu and Pawl’s wives, Marija and Rita. Half the female population here is called Marija. Which, considering the average family size, makes the mind boggle a bit.

  Rita wears a heroic amount of lipstick and is the only one of the women who didn’t produce a bundle of knitting whenever we paused for one of the infinite periods of waiting that characterise dealings with Maltese bureaucracy. It was Rita who brought the bunch of lilies grown in her own garden t
o go with my bridal attire, and Rita who shocks the assembled by gaily ordering two bottles of sweet pink local frizzante to accompany the nuptial feast we treat them all to on the balcony at Giannini, overlooking not only the great expanse of Marsamxett harbour and the dancing lights of Manoel island, but also, as luck would have it, the firework display at the Sliema festa on the far side of the water. I can’t help it: infected by the superstitious Catholicism amidst which I’ve been living over the last couple of months, I can’t see it as anything other than a good omen.

  Of course, a more pessimistic soul might see it as an omen of fireworks to come, but this is my wedding night. I know they always say that and everything, but I am the happiest I have ever been. I didn’t know it was possible to be this happy and not actually die. I’ve got this permanent lump in my throat, and every time I look up and catch sight of this man who is now my husband, I feel an urge to start blubbing, to punch my fists through the air and shout out my joy and to wrap my arms around his neck and sink into the oblivion of intimacy, all at once, all in one go.

  The evening is still hot though it’s late October, and on the balcony, where tiny breezes catch and cool, we breathe in lungsful of that heady, combined scent of shit and oleander that will always tip me into romantic nostalgia from now on.

  We’ve drunk the disgusting wine, which the locals have consumed with a lip-smacking gusto that suggests to me that their tastebuds have been eroded by too much seawater, and eaten antipasti, fat shrimp with chillis and olive oil, chateaubriand and a chocolate wedding cake that Rufus has spirited up without my knowing. I’m in a slip dress of gold silk that I ordered for big bikkies from Rome at the internet café in Rabat, and Rufus, after three goes at the dry-cleaners, has got his grandfather’s linen suit, the one whose jacket he gave me when we first met, presentable enough to wear.

  Rufus has his hand between my thighs under the white tablecloth, and I’m thinking: my God, this is it. Every day, I shall wake and the first thing I see will be him. I’ll go to sleep to the sound of his breathing. He will kiss my neck another twenty, thirty thousand times before I die. And I’m thinking: glorious, glorious, glorious! This is what I’ve waited for all these years, and it’s so easy! And then Twanny, as if he’s heard my thoughts, immediately sabotages everything with a question I simply don’t understand.

  ‘Aooh!’ he calls to me down the table. ‘How you gettin’ on with Lady Mary, then?’

  ‘Who?’ I ask. Actually, I say something like ‘Uh?’.

  He raises his eyebrows, glances at my husband. ‘Lady Mary,’ he repeats. The name sounds more like a racehorse to me than anything else. ‘Ay yexpekted to see her here.’

  ‘She’s at home,’ Rufus interjects smoothly. ‘Tilly’s having a baby, you know, and she’s come home for the duration.’

  ‘But she’ll be gutted,’ Twanny persists, ‘to have missed it.’

  ‘I’m sure she will,’ says Rufus.

  Twanny turns back to me. ‘So how you been getting on, then, the two of you?’

  The table has fallen silent, and eight pairs of eyes regard me with the bushy-tailed glee of people who have finally got on to the subject they’ve been dying to broach all night. And I still don’t know who the hell they’re talking about.

  ‘I,’ I say, thinking fast, ‘I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting her yet. I can’t wait …’

  There’s an almost imperceptible shift among them, the frisson of a shared joke. ‘I’m sure she’ll love you,’ says Rita, and I’m not sure if she’s giving me a compliment or not. The heat begins to rise in my cheeks.

  ‘So you all know her, then?’ I ask.

  All four men raise their hands, and three of the women. Oh God. So it’s only me, then. I attempt to flash glances at Rufus, but, his hand suddenly withdrawn, he seems to be intent on studying the innards of a fig and doesn’t look up. Who is Lady Mary? Rufus? Help me out here? Husband, remember?

  ‘She’s an amazing lady,’ says Twanny. ‘Everyone around here knows her,’ and again I feel that frisson, feel it blow over the hairs on my back.

  ‘She likes to support things,’ says Marija Mifsud, and Rufus suddenly looks up and gives her a sunny smile of amusement.

  ‘Sure does,’ he says. ‘What’s she supporting out here at the moment? I’ve rather lost track.’

  ‘Animal sanctuary. Traditional crafts. The museum at Gharb.’

  ‘And family planning,’ says Rita in her old-fashioned subcontinental-style English. ‘She’s got Father Buttigieg in a proper two-and-two.’

  Another smile. ‘Sounds like my mother, all right,’ he says.

  Shit, so this Lady Mary is Rufus’s mother. It’s already come as a bit of a surprise to find that I’ve married a man called, not Watson, as I’d thought, but Callington-Warbeck-Wattestone. I guess you should always have a look at someone’s passport before you throw your lot in with them.

  ‘How is she?’ Stiefnu sits back from the table, lights a red Rothman.

  ‘She’s well,’ says Rufus.

  ‘So how come’s you haven’t introduced her to your fiancée, then?’ asks Stiefnu. The idea that there are no emotional in-laws at the table is a source of perplexity to them all: they share the Mediterranean love for family, and evidently can’t imagine a world where people get married without the full complement of polyester lace bandages and weeping grandmas.

  But not just that: he’s hit the nail on the head. And that makes me the sort of person who marries a guy without asking that question myself. I mean, how can I have got hitched to someone and not even known that there was a title in the family?

  ‘Oh, you know …’ I can see that Rufus is trying to make a joke of it. ‘I was afraid Mel would run for the hills if I let her get a whiff of the family before I’d got her firmly tied down with a contract.’

  The whole table laughs, and there’s something alarmingly knowing about the sound of their mirth. I co-operate, laugh along. It’s probably nothing. It’s probably my own paranoia.

  But I do notice that Rufus still isn’t meeting my eye.

  Chapter Five

  Cold Feet

  ‘OK, mate. Time to come clean.’

  We’re huddled together on the viewing platform at the Cirkewwa Tower. I’ve got his jacket on, and he’s wrapped himself in the shawl that came with my dress. We’ve got an open bottle of lukewarm Lanson at our feet and a scotched and water-stained pack of Marlboro in the jacket pocket. And at last I have a chance to pin him down.

  ‘Oh, bugger,’ he says, ‘I’d hoped you’d forget about all that until tomorrow.’

  ‘Not a hope, mate.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Well, for a start, there’s the small matter of your name.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘What about it? Well, exc-yuze me, but do you really think that ‘Charles Rufus Edmund Callington-Warbeck-Wattestone’ is not an issue?’

  ‘Watson,’ he says faintly; ‘it is actually pronounced Watson.’

  ‘Straying off the point, mate. So how come’s you didn’t see fit to break the news to me before I was goggling like a gurnard in the registry?’

  ‘Yuh,’ he says, ‘well, because sticking your hand out and introducing yourself by that handle is not a guaranteed icebreaker.’

  ‘Yeah, and I looked like a right tit when my jaw cracked on the floor. I’m surprised they didn’t call a halt to the whole thing there and then on grounds of kidnap. Still, I don’t suppose it’s any harder to pronounce than Katsouris. How do you fit that lot into the boxes on a tax form?’

  ‘You don’t,’ he says. ‘That’s one of the reasons I call myself Wattestone.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘People make assumptions,’ he says.

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘You’d have made assumptions.’

  ‘Would they have been false assumptions?’

  He bites his lip, concedes the point. ‘Well, no. Probably not.’

  ‘Oh
hell.’

  ‘Blimey, Melody,’ he protests. ‘It’s not that bad! I’m not a mass murderer!’

  ‘Got any in the family?’

  Rufus laughs nervously. ‘No. No. Well, not for a while, anyway. They’re all eminently respectable. Eminent respectability has been the family byword for hundreds of years. It’s practically a motto.’

  ‘Hundreds of years? I can’t trace my lot back more than three generations!’

  ‘Well …’ he shrugs. ‘It’s not something I exactly show off about …’

  ‘But all the same.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to be ashamed of it.’

  I overreact. It’s been a long day. ‘Oh, right. So it’s that I’m not good enough, then?’

  ‘No. No. Melody, no! Please. Don’t twist my words. You’re fine. No, you’re more than fine, you’re lovely. You’re wonderful. You’re my wife. I’m prouder of you than anything else in my life.’

  But I’m on a roll now, and I’m not going to let him get away with it that easily. ‘Well, if that’s so, how come you haven’t told them about me?’

  Rufus takes a slug from the bottle, a drag on his cigarette. ‘My darling, I could ask you the same question,’ he says drily.

  He has a point.

  I endeavour to change the subject. I’m a woman, after all. Keeping the menfolk in the wrong is second nature.

  ‘Yes, but,’ I say, ‘you haven’t just gone to your own wedding party and found out that you’re the only person there who doesn’t know your mother-in-law. And that what’s more, there’s obviously some big joke I’ve not been let in on.’

  ‘I told you,’ he says, throwing away his butt, ‘the Xewkija house has been in the family for ages. Mummy’s father was stationed over here before the war and this was their holiday house when it got too hot in Valletta. Mummy spent most of her childhood here.’